Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have been used by the militmy for surveillance and reconnaissance operutions for the past few decades. The recent prol$eratinn of wireless networking technologies enables the equipment of UAVs with wireless transceivers, and that can in turn allow them to communicate with the fnendly ground nodes as well as other UAVs. Since rugged ground terrain can result in significant signal attenuation, the gmund netwurk can be severely partitioned. Huwever the lower propagation lass between ground and airborne nodes can be efectively utilized to connect rhe islands of connectivity on the ground to form a unified ad hoc network. In this paper; we investigate the UAV placement and navigation strategies with the end goal of improving network connectivity. Since the ground nodes can be mobile, a fired placement strategy is either inadequate or wasteful; hence, we propose to use local Jrocking rules that aerial living beings like birds and insects follow, to meet our goals. We show by simulation that a flocking based navigation strategy is adaptive tu the motion of ground nodes and can indeed maintain high connectivity in a mbile ground network.
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